The Coordinating Research Council, Inc. (CRC) is a non-profit corporation supported by the petroleum and automotive equipment industries. CRC operates through the committees made up of technical experts from industry and government who voluntarily participate. CRC’s function is to provide the mechanism for joint research conducted by the two industries that will help in determining the optimum combination of petroleum products and automotive equipment. CRC’s work is limited to research that is mutually beneficial to the two industries involved. The final results of the research conducted by, or under the auspices of, CRC are available to the public.

This follow on project, CRC E-102-2, was undertaken by (S&T)2 and was intended to support the uncertainty analysis that was undertaken in CRC Project E-102 with supporting data from published literature. The objective was to find a range of values and/or parameter distributions outside of the default values for a specific pathway in GREET 2014, GHGenius, and BioGrace. Unlike project E-102, which looked at the well to wheel emissions of the vehicle and fuel pathways, this work considered the well to tank portion of the pathways (with the exception of heavy duty natural gas vehicles).

The CRC identified three primary tasks for this project: a review of the literature on the corn ethanol pathway that considered the N2O emissions from corn production, energy use at corn ethanol plants, and co-product issues; a review of the other pathways, and Monte Carlo simulations of all six pathways in each of the three models.